“Padmore provides context by singing Dowland's original song before Craig Ogden steals in, alert to the Nocturnal's every nuance, and with a palette of colours both caressing and disquieting. Completing the frame, 'Flow my Tears' is beautifully inflected, though finer still is 'In Darkness let me Dwell' where in the final bars Padmore's enrapt engagement seems to conjure up the very chill of death.” BBC Music Magazine, February 2008 ****
“Mark Padmore again shows why he is one of today's finest tenors. The quicker songs, like "Away with these self-loving lads", gain in clarity from a semi-declamatory approach, while the slower are eerily viol-like.” Gramophone Magazine, Janurary 2008
“A simply brilliant disc. I can’t praise it enough. A bronze Liz Kenny should be on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, in my opinion” Early Music Today
“Since Emma Kirkby’s first recording in the late-1970s, we have known what to expect from Dowland’s lute songs. Some fine discs have followed, but not until Mark Padmore and Elizabeth Kenny’s new release has there been one as radical in
its potential impact on our understanding of the music. With tonal purity intact, voice and lute add subtle decoration, rhythmic fluidity, drama and rich poetic sensibility to these songs” The Independent on Sunday
“... extraordinary diction and whispering chamber-like intimacy … [Mark Padmore] joy in conveying the emotional core of each situation” Gramophone Magazine
Building a Library